red and white
I've spent the past half hour - really, the past several days - trying to gather my thoughts for an entry. It hasn't been easy.
If I had better pictures, I would probably just dump a bunch of photos here with some small commentary and call it a day. I'm still processing so much of what I've heard and seen here, and I'm still trying to understand it myself. I'm not sure how eloquent I can be for an audience.
But I'll try. It'll help.
The delegation is based, as I've said, in Kenora, Ontario, which is a fairly small town built around sports fishing and other outdoorsy forms of tourism. Although about 15% of the local population is aboriginal, the town itself is whitewashed to the point where one wonders if there's some clause in the town charter about ignoring minorities. Don't get me wrong - it's a beautiful area, and Main Street is lined with lovely shops and locally owned restaurants, but then I'm white, and I'm accepted without question into this town, and its businesses.
On our first full day in Kenora, the team went to a fish fry on Saturday at the Fellowship Centre (which primarily serves First Nations peoples), and we met with several people during the picnic, Native and non-Native. Nan, an energetic, buoyant woman with curly silver hair and bright red lipstick, was serving guests. She told us about life in Kenora back in the '60s and '70s, when racism wasn't hidden, as it is today, but as in-your-face in town as it was in the Southern US in the same period. She said that, fifty years ago, business owners would hang signs on their windows saying, "Indians Not Served Here." Fifty years ago seems like a long time, but as I said, racism still exists here, in a big way. But now, it's not as easy to point out as signs in windows and ordinances on the books. (I'm assuming there were ordinances, again like in the South.)
Today, for example, we visited the Lake of the Woods Museum in downtown Kenora. Since I knew that the museum had hosted the award-winning exhibit on residential schools, "We Were Taught Differently", I had a certain set of expectations on what I'd find at this museum. A representation of Anishinabe life in the region, for instance. Maybe even an exhibit on the struggle of local First Nations to live together with the often-hostile white communities, and Canadian government.
Silly, silly me.
There was one exhibit, near the entrance to the museum (and at the beginning, chronologically speaking), on the First Nations. Several prettily arranged display cases, with stuffed deer and wolves, a birch-bark canoe, traditional dresses and beautiful examples of Anishinabe embroidery, greeted the visitor. But, aside from a few lines of description (by way of introduction) on large panels above the displays, there were no explanations of the items in the cases. No placards, no item numbers with dates, not even a plaque saying how the museum acquired these things. (Were they donated by local Natives? By local whites -- ie, were they stolen? I have no idea.) The exhibits then progressed to the advent of white settlers, the settling of the town of Kenora by whites, the home life of a typical white settler woman (I'm serious), the gold rush, the timber industry, and then, incongruously, a special exhibit on arcade and video games through the ages. All of those other exhibits were peppered with quotes from diaries and local leaders at the times, explanatory placards, and item descriptors.
I was too infuriated at the time to take any pictures, although now I wish I had so that you'll really believe I'm not exaggerating this. To be fair, insofar as I feel like being fair, here, the museum isn't enormous. There are two levels, and a lot of room is taken up by ramps and walkways and windows, so the whole place feels very airy, and open. I appreciate that in my museums, and I appreciated it here. But did they have to devote 90% of the exhibit space to white settlers? Anyway. I also found out this afternoon that apparently the museum has in its collection a large number of Native-related items (I hate it when they call them "artifacts"), but what goes on exhibit is (supposedly) not unrelated to who in the community contributes the most money to the museum. So if the influential businessman (and there are those - I heard a couple of names, but don't remember them, and wouldn't share them here anyway) throws a lot of money into a particular theme, that's what's going on display.
*fists of rage*
I contrast this to the experience we had yesterday at Grassy Narrows, the First Nation on which we're spending half our time here. We participated in a workshop all day yesterday on undoing racism and colonialism, which was intense and possibly transformative in ways I'm not ready to describe, yet - but it was - and then we went out to the blockade site for a little feast with members of the community.
Where that experience was powerful, and inspiring, and reminded me a great deal of my time in Minnesota, four years ago (more on that later, probably), today was - well, like coming back to white society always is. Annoying.
I'll write more later, but I'll leave you with an illustrative, if very nightly-newsy, video on yet another issue plaguing Grassy. Watch it; I'll write more about that side of life here tomorrow or the next day.
ETA: Read this too. This is huge. Check out the comments, as well, for more of the kind of attitudes I talked about here.
...
At sunset, at the blockade site. The stalks that look like grass are wild rice, about a month out from harvesting.
If I had better pictures, I would probably just dump a bunch of photos here with some small commentary and call it a day. I'm still processing so much of what I've heard and seen here, and I'm still trying to understand it myself. I'm not sure how eloquent I can be for an audience.
But I'll try. It'll help.
The delegation is based, as I've said, in Kenora, Ontario, which is a fairly small town built around sports fishing and other outdoorsy forms of tourism. Although about 15% of the local population is aboriginal, the town itself is whitewashed to the point where one wonders if there's some clause in the town charter about ignoring minorities. Don't get me wrong - it's a beautiful area, and Main Street is lined with lovely shops and locally owned restaurants, but then I'm white, and I'm accepted without question into this town, and its businesses.
On our first full day in Kenora, the team went to a fish fry on Saturday at the Fellowship Centre (which primarily serves First Nations peoples), and we met with several people during the picnic, Native and non-Native. Nan, an energetic, buoyant woman with curly silver hair and bright red lipstick, was serving guests. She told us about life in Kenora back in the '60s and '70s, when racism wasn't hidden, as it is today, but as in-your-face in town as it was in the Southern US in the same period. She said that, fifty years ago, business owners would hang signs on their windows saying, "Indians Not Served Here." Fifty years ago seems like a long time, but as I said, racism still exists here, in a big way. But now, it's not as easy to point out as signs in windows and ordinances on the books. (I'm assuming there were ordinances, again like in the South.)
Today, for example, we visited the Lake of the Woods Museum in downtown Kenora. Since I knew that the museum had hosted the award-winning exhibit on residential schools, "We Were Taught Differently", I had a certain set of expectations on what I'd find at this museum. A representation of Anishinabe life in the region, for instance. Maybe even an exhibit on the struggle of local First Nations to live together with the often-hostile white communities, and Canadian government.
Silly, silly me.
There was one exhibit, near the entrance to the museum (and at the beginning, chronologically speaking), on the First Nations. Several prettily arranged display cases, with stuffed deer and wolves, a birch-bark canoe, traditional dresses and beautiful examples of Anishinabe embroidery, greeted the visitor. But, aside from a few lines of description (by way of introduction) on large panels above the displays, there were no explanations of the items in the cases. No placards, no item numbers with dates, not even a plaque saying how the museum acquired these things. (Were they donated by local Natives? By local whites -- ie, were they stolen? I have no idea.) The exhibits then progressed to the advent of white settlers, the settling of the town of Kenora by whites, the home life of a typical white settler woman (I'm serious), the gold rush, the timber industry, and then, incongruously, a special exhibit on arcade and video games through the ages. All of those other exhibits were peppered with quotes from diaries and local leaders at the times, explanatory placards, and item descriptors.
I was too infuriated at the time to take any pictures, although now I wish I had so that you'll really believe I'm not exaggerating this. To be fair, insofar as I feel like being fair, here, the museum isn't enormous. There are two levels, and a lot of room is taken up by ramps and walkways and windows, so the whole place feels very airy, and open. I appreciate that in my museums, and I appreciated it here. But did they have to devote 90% of the exhibit space to white settlers? Anyway. I also found out this afternoon that apparently the museum has in its collection a large number of Native-related items (I hate it when they call them "artifacts"), but what goes on exhibit is (supposedly) not unrelated to who in the community contributes the most money to the museum. So if the influential businessman (and there are those - I heard a couple of names, but don't remember them, and wouldn't share them here anyway) throws a lot of money into a particular theme, that's what's going on display.
*fists of rage*
I contrast this to the experience we had yesterday at Grassy Narrows, the First Nation on which we're spending half our time here. We participated in a workshop all day yesterday on undoing racism and colonialism, which was intense and possibly transformative in ways I'm not ready to describe, yet - but it was - and then we went out to the blockade site for a little feast with members of the community.
Where that experience was powerful, and inspiring, and reminded me a great deal of my time in Minnesota, four years ago (more on that later, probably), today was - well, like coming back to white society always is. Annoying.
I'll write more later, but I'll leave you with an illustrative, if very nightly-newsy, video on yet another issue plaguing Grassy. Watch it; I'll write more about that side of life here tomorrow or the next day.
ETA: Read this too. This is huge. Check out the comments, as well, for more of the kind of attitudes I talked about here.
...
At sunset, at the blockade site. The stalks that look like grass are wild rice, about a month out from harvesting.